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e Golden Bowl
English.
“It doesn’t, I fear, seem particularly mine. And it doesn’t
in the least matter, over there, whether one likes it or not—
that is to anyone but one’s self. But I didn’t like it,” said
Charlotte Stant.
“at’s not encouraging then to me, is it?” the Prince
went on.
“Do you mean because you’re going?”
“Oh yes, of course we’re going. I’ve wanted immensely to
go.” She hesitated. “But now?—immediately?”
“In a month or two—it seems to be the new idea.” On
which there was something in her face—as he imagined—
that made him say: “Didn’t Maggie write to you?”
“Not of your going at once. But of course you must go.
And of course you must stay”—Charlotte was easily clear—
”as long as possible.”
“Is that what you did?” he laughed. “You stayed as long
as possible?”
“Well, it seemed to me so—but I hadn’t ‘interests.’ You’ll
have them—on a great scale. It’s the country for interests,”
said Charlotte. “If I had only had a few I doubtless wouldn’t
have left it.”
He waited an instant; they were still on their feet. “Yours
then are rather here?”
“Oh, mine!”—the girl smiled. “ey take up little room,
wherever they are.”
It determined in him, the way this came from her and
what it somehow did for her-it determined in him a speech
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that would have seemed a few minutes before precarious and
in questionable taste. e lead she had given him made the
dierence, and he felt it as really a lift on nding an honest
and natural word rise, by its license, to his lips. Nothing
surely could be, for both of them, more in the note of a high
bravery. “I’ve been thinking it all the while so probable, you
know, that you would have seen your way to marrying.”
She looked at him an instant, and, just for these seconds,
he feared for what he might have spoiled. “To marrying
whom?”
“Why, some good, kind, clever, rich American.”
Again his security hung in the balance—then she was, as
he felt, admirable.
“I tried everyone I came across. I did my best. I showed I
had come, quite publicly, FOR that. Perhaps I showed it too
much. At any rate it was no use. I had to recognise it. No one
would have me.” en she seemed to show as sorry for his
having to hear of her anything so disconcerting. She pitied
his feeling about it; if he was disappointed she would cheer
him up. “Existence, you know, all the same, doesn’t depend
on that. I mean,” she smiled, “on having caught a husband.”
“Oh—existence!” the Prince vaguely commented. “You
think I ought to argue for more than mere existence?” she
asked. “I don’t see why MY existence—even reduced as much
as you like to being merely mine—should be so impossible.
ere are things, of sorts, I should be able to have—things I
should be able to be. e position of a single woman to-day
is very favourable, you know.”
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“Favourable to what?”
“Why, just TO existence—which may contain, after
all, in one way and another, so much. It may contain, at the
worst, even aections; aections in fact quite particularly;
xed, that is, on one’s friends. I’m extremely fond of Maggie,
for instance—I quite adore her. How could I adore her more
if I were married to one of the people you speak of?”
e Prince gave a laugh. “You might adore HIM more—
!”
“Ah, but it isn’t, is it?” she asked, “a question of that.”
“My dear friend,” he returned, “it’s always a question
of doing the best for one’s self one can—without injury to
others.” He felt by this time that they were indeed on an
excellent basis; so he went on again, as if to show frankly his
sense of its rmness. “I venture therefore to repeat my hope
that you’ll marry some capital fellow; and also to repeat my
belief that such a marriage will be more favourable to you, as
you call it, than even the spirit of the age.”
She looked at him at rst only for answer, and would
have appeared to take it with meekness had she not perhaps
appeared a little more to take it with gaiety. “ank you very
much,” she simply said; but at that moment their friend was
with them again. It was undeniable that, as she came in,
Mrs. Assingham looked, with a certain smiling sharpness,
from one of them to the other; the perception of which
was perhaps what led Charlotte, for reassurance, to pass the
question on. “e Prince hopes so much I shall still marry
some good person.”
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Whether it worked for Mrs. Assingham or not, the
Prince was himself, at this, more than ever reassured. He was
SAFE, in a word—that was what it all meant; and he had
required to be safe. He was really safe enough for almost
any joke. “It’s only,” he explained to their hostess, “because
of what Miss Stant has been telling me. Don’t we want to
keep up her courage?” If the joke was broad he had at least
not begun it—not, that is, AS a joke; which was what his
companion’s address to their friend made of it. “She has been
trying in America, she says, but hasn’t brought it o.”
e tone was somehow not what Mrs. Assingham had
expected, but she made the best of it. “Well then,” she replied
to the young man, “if you take such an interest you must
bring it o.”
“And you must help, dear,” Charlotte said unperturbed—
”as you’ve helped, so beautifully, in such things before.” With
which, before Mrs. Assingham could meet the appeal, she
had addressed herself to the Prince on a matter much nearer
to him. “YOUR marriage is on Friday?—on Saturday?”
“Oh, on Friday, no! For what do you take us? ere’s not
a vulgar omen we’re neglecting. On Saturday, please, at the
Oratory, at three o’clock—before twelve assistants exactly.”
“Twelve including ME?”
It struck him—he laughed. “You’ll make the thirteenth.
It won’t do!”
“Not,” said Charlotte, “if you’re going in for ‘omens.’
Should you like me to stay away?”
“Dear no—we’ll manage. We’ll make the round
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number—we’ll have in some old woman. ey must keep
them there for that, don’t they?”
Mrs. Assingham’s return had at last indicated for him
his departure; he had possessed himself again of his hat and
approached her to take leave. But he had another word for
Charlotte. “I dine to-night with Mr. Verver. Have you any
message?”
e girl seemed to wonder a little. “For Mr. Verver?”
“For Maggie—about her seeing you early. at, I know,
is what she’ll like.”
“en I’ll come early—thanks.”
“I daresay,” he went on, “she’ll send for you. I mean send
a carriage.”
“Oh, I don’t require that, thanks. I can go, for a penny,
can’t I?” she asked of Mrs. Assingham, “in an omnibus.”
“Oh, I say!” said the Prince while Mrs. Assingham looked
at her blandly.
“Yes, love—and I’ll give you the penny. She shall get
there,” the good lady added to their friend.
But Charlotte, as the latter took leave of her, thought of
something else. “ere’s a great favour, Prince, that I want
to ask of you. I want, between this and Saturday, to make
Maggie a marriage-present.”
“Oh, I say!” the young man again soothingly exclaimed.
“Ah, but I MUST,” she went on. “It’s really almost for
that I came back. It was impossible to get in America what
I wanted.”
Mrs. Assingham showed anxiety. “What is it then, dear,
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you want?”
But the girl looked only at their companion. “at’s what
the Prince, if he’ll be so good, must help me to decide.”
“Can’t I,” Mrs. Assingham asked, “help you to decide?”
“Certainly, darling, we must talk it well over.” And she
kept her eyes on the Prince. “But I want him, if he kindly
will, to go with me to look. I want him to judge with me and
choose. at, if you can spare the hour,” she said, “is the great
favour I mean.”
He raised his eyebrows at her—he wonderfully smiled.
“What you came back from America to ask? Ah, certainly
then, I must nd the hour!” He wonderfully smiled, but it
was rather more, after all, than he had been reckoning with.
It went somehow so little with the rest that, directly, for him,
it wasn’t the note of safety; it preserved this character, at the
best, but by being the note of publicity. Quickly, quickly,
however, the note of publicity struck him as better than any
other. In another moment even it seemed positively what he
wanted; for what so much as publicity put their relation on
the right footing? By this appeal to Mrs. Assingham it was
established as right, and she immediately showed that such
was her own understanding.
“Certainly, Prince,” she laughed, “you must nd the
hour!” And it was really so express a license from her, as
representing friendly judgment, public opinion, the moral
law, the margin allowed a husband about to be, or whatever,
that, after observing to Charlotte that, should she come to
Portland Place in the morning, he would make a point of
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being there to see her and so, easily, arrange with her about
a time, he took his departure with the absolutely conrmed
impression of knowing, as he put it to himself, where he
was. Which was what he had prolonged his visit for. He was
where he could stay.
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IV
“I don’t quite see, my dear,” Colonel Assingham said to
his wife the night of Charlotte’s arrival, “I don’t quite see, I’m
bound to say, why you take it, even at the worst, so ferociously
hard. It isn’t your fault, after all, is it? I’ll be hanged, at any
rate, if it’s mine.”
e hour was late, and the young lady who had
disembarked at Southampton that morning to come up by
the “steamer special,” and who had then settled herself at
an hotel only to re-settle herself a couple of hours later at a
private house, was by this time, they might hope, peacefully
resting from her exploits. ere had been two men at dinner,
rather battered brothers-in-arms, of his own period, casually
picked up by her host the day before, and when the gentlemen,
after the meal, rejoined the ladies in the drawing-room,
Charlotte, pleading fatigue, had already excused herself. e
beguiled warriors, however, had stayed till after eleven—Mrs.
Assingham, though nally quite without illusions, as she
said, about the military character, was always beguiling to
old soldiers; and as the Colonel had come in, before dinner,
only in time to dress, he had not till this moment really been
summoned to meet his companion over the situation that,
as he was now to learn, their visitor’s advent had created for
them. It was actually more than midnight, the servants had
been sent to bed, the rattle of the wheels had ceased to come
in through a window still open to the August air, and Robert
Assingham had been steadily learning, all the while, what it
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thus behoved him to know. But the words just quoted from
him presented themselves, for the moment, as the essence
of his spirit and his attitude. He disengaged, he would be
damned if he didn’t—they were both phrases he repeatedly
used—his responsibility. e simplest, the sanest, the most
obliging of men, he habitually indulged in extravagant
language. His wife had once told him, in relation to his
violence of speech; that such excesses, on his part, made her
think of a retired General whom she had once seen playing
with toy soldiers, ghting and winning battles, carrying on
sieges and annihilating enemies with little fortresses of wood
and little armies of tin. Her husband’s exaggerated emphasis
was his box of toy soldiers, his military game. It harmlessly
gratied in him, for his declining years, the military instinct;
bad words, when suciently numerous and arrayed in their
might, could represent battalions, squadrons, tremendous
cannonades and glorious charges of cavalry. It was natural,
it was delightful—the romance, and for her as well, of camp
life and of the perpetual booming of guns. It was ghting to
the end, to the death, but no one was ever killed.
Less fortunate than she, nevertheless, in spite of his
wealth of expression, he had not yet found the image that
described her favourite game; all he could do was practically
to leave it to her, emulating her own philosophy. He had
again and again sat up late to discuss those situations in
which her ner consciousness abounded, but he had never
failed to deny that anything in life, anything of hers, could
be a situation for himself. She might be in fty at once if she
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liked—and it was what women did like, at their ease, after
all; there always being, when they had too much of any, some
man, as they were well aware, to get them out. He wouldn’t at
any price, have one, of any sort whatever, of his own, or even
be in one along with her. He watched her, accordingly, in her
favourite element, very much as he had sometimes watched,
at the Aquarium, the celebrated lady who, in a slight, though
tight, bathing-suit, turned somersaults and did tricks in the
tank of water which looked so cold and uncomfortable to
the non-amphibious. He listened to his companion to-night,
while he smoked his last pipe, he watched her through her
demonstration, quite as if he had paid a shilling. But it was
true that, this being the case, he desired the value of his
money. What was it, in the name of wonder, that she was so
bent on being responsible FOR? What did she pretend was
going to happen, and what, at the worst, could the poor girl
do, even granting she wanted to do anything? What, at the
worst, for that matter, could she be conceived to have in her
head?
“If she had told me the moment she got here,” Mrs.
Assingham replied, “I shouldn’t have my diculty in nding
out. But she wasn’t so obliging, and I see no sign at all of
her becoming so. What’s certain is that she didn’t come for
nothing. She wants”—she worked it out at her leisure—”to
see the Prince again. THAT isn’t what troubles me. I mean
that such a fact, as a fact, isn’t. But what I ask myself is, What
does she want it FOR?”
“What’s the good of asking yourself if you know you
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